Templars Hall

I’d like to thank everyone who commented on yesterday’s report on WLR from Templar’s Hall in Waterford.  Of course it was nice to have so much positive feedback, and those who expressed reservations about the piece have given me food for thought in the coming days. I have to admit, the confrontations with drunken revelers were kinda fun (and what you heard was pretty much what happened, I don’t believe in stitching people up in the editing room), but the thought of anyone trying to bring up their family in this environment was profoundly upsetting.  I went to Templar’s Hall on Monday night to see just how bad the anti-social behaviour engaged in by some of the students in rented houses there is. Context is everything.  This is a demographic mis-match. If there were no families living in Templars Hall I suppose the behaviour would fall under youthful joie de vivre and they’d left to their own devices. Although students who go to college primarily to study (they do exist) might still have cause to complain.  However the fact is that families do live in Templar’s Hall.  Many moved out as it became apparent just quite how many houses had been sold to landlords intent on renting to students.  Often those moving out sold to landlords thereby intensifying the problem.  With the property market in Ireland now moribund, those left behind no longer have the option to sell out.  Besides, their children are going to local schools, many of them work locally so why should they?  The main problem I witnessed on Monday wasn’t so much individual behaviour (although some of that was pretty bad) but it was the scale of the problem.  One or two parties in a residential estate are hardly anything to worry about, but loud 4/4 beats coming from every third or fourth house two or three nights a week?  There’s nothing worth commenting on in a group of boisterous twenty year olds walking the street, but when these groups traipse up and down an estate or 50, 20 or even 10 yard intervals all night, filling the air with incoherent laughter and clinking bags, it’s not surprising a family might feel trapped. In that case there is no cruel intention but the effect remains upsetting.  A bottle might be broken on any street, but every corner, every green space, every nook and cranny of an estate where a child might be expected to play out their childhood? Then there’s the simple fact that these are young people, not perhaps best adept at keeping their properties clean, an inadequacy that will extend to the garden, and then the street. Having scant regard for the properties they live in, this lack of respect is, I think, extended to the estate as a whole, and to the people trying to make a life there.  Because the rationale of the partying renters in Templar’s Hall tends to put the blame back on the families living there – “What do they expect?” “Students are going to party, they shouldn’t have moved here”.  Even if this reasoning were sound - which it isn’t - it doesn’t actually absolve them of responsibility for their behaviour. I know he never went to trial, but if he did, I don’t even think Fred West would have argued in court that his victims had it coming “I am Fred West after all”.  It seems to me perfectly true that families and students are not ideal neighbours, but that’s not the fault of the residents, and it doesn’t absolve people from their responsibilities to one another.  There may also be a seperate issue with young men.  While girls were prepared to at least attempt to explain themselves to me, the response of the drunken young men I came across was either “no comment” (a statement which many seemed to believe carried legally binding powers) or “fuck off” (which again was a request I had no legal obligation to comply with).  Drinking in their own groups, the men were loud and raucous, but I couldn’t help thinking that these young men, brought up in the internet age, walked into this estate sober and without the social skills to engage with their neighbours in a way that might create some understanding and report.  This is a highly contentious and subjective statement, but here goes: I think there are many young men whose social skills operate on two settings: morbid shyness and drunken exuberance. Add to that the inevitable herd mentality and primacy of the peer group, and there is a sense in which these men don’t perhaps believe that society exists.  Mrs. Thatcher is often misquoted on this issue of  society. She wasn’t advocating naked individualism (which isn’t to say that’s not what her policies created) but her argument was that “society” came down to the good will, or not, of individuals. There are perhaps too many individuals surrendering their innate decency to a headless, rudderless herd intent on having a “good time” at all costs.

Bad News

A few months ago we were covering a story on WLR about the takeover of US pharmaceutical firm Genzyme by French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.  Exciting eh? The thing is of course, Genzyme is a major employer in Waterford and one of the few in the last three years that didn't appear to have a question mark hanging over it, but takeovers make people nervous.  And so they should, takeovers are one of the times when the naked ruthlessness of capitalism is exposed, on show for all to see. Sanofi appeared to be smiling at Genzyme through shark's teeth.  Besides, as the good people in Talk Talk management proved this week, profitability and a good workforce is no reason not to close a factory. In order to make sense of the Genzyme takeover – which was safely outside the power of my mind - I got in contact with Meg Tyrell, a Bloomberg correspondent who knew the sector inside out and was very helpful.  She seemed to think everything would be okay in the short and medium term, as for the long term, well, capitalism doesn’t really do the long term.  I told her afterwards how glad I was not to have relay any more bad news to people in Waterford, “I hear you on that” came the response from the American accent on the other end of the line. It’s truly horrible to have to report on job losses, not as bad as having to endure the lost job itself, but it is depressing and working as I do for a business that depends on local spending power, it’s not hard to see personal consequences down the line.  Last week’s news that Talk Talk was closing its Waterford operation with the loss of 575 jobs left me and many like me nauseated with worry as to how this will affect my city and family; meeting the workers affected left me angry and upset with how ordinary, decent working people in Waterford were being treated by the principles of international capitalism.  Of course, as I say that I have to acknowledge that the jobs wouldn’t have existed in the first place without international capitalism – you get no answers off me folks.  None of the emotions I’ve just described have any place in the reporting of this story, one can only hope that feeling upset, angry, scared might bring you closer to the factual truth of how the workers are feeling, but I don’t advise going all Peter Finch.  Over the weekend we also marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  That was a bad news day.  The attacks started just before two in the afternoon Irish time.  I was reading the news that day but was still pretty new to the job.  I knew a plane had hit the tower when I went to read the news at two o’clock, but I no had real idea what was going on, or the size of the aircraft.  As I was getting towards the end of the bulletin, I was told a second plane had crashed into the other tower, confirming not only was it not an accident, but a coordinated attack.  While I was reading the news on WLR at three o’clock, still not fully understanding what the hell was going on, I was given a message on air that the first tower had collapsed.  At the time I wasn’t used to broadcasting off the cuff, I clearly remember my throat contracting and mouth drying up but most particularly a dizziness as my brain started to issue emotional responses, as if on reflex, while I was live on air.  With the collapse of the tower I knew that thousands of people had just been murdered and that something terrible was going on.  The most frightening thing was not knowing where this was going to end. What happened was bad enough, but at the time, as the news got worse and worse and events built up with a brutal speed, we wondered what was next. It seemed so many people were involved in the attack and intent on so much destruction that I remember thinking a nuclear explosion had to be next. For a half an hour, as the towers were collapsing, I wondered whether this was the end of the world.  It was hard to deliver news that day. New York being the world’s greatest city, its destruction felt a bit like the end of the world. The fact that so many of those emergency personnel had Irish surnames made the whole thing a lot personal to us.  But that wasn’t my worst bad news day.   That was the day when Waterford’s end of the world came.  When receivers pulled the plug on Waterford Crystal in January 2009, the national press spoke about hundreds of job losses, quite right too.  In Waterford though, the closure, and the brutal way it was handled, and most of all the desperate defiance of the workforce, went beyond figures and lost incomes.  It was a spiritual and existential crisis for every single individual in the city.  Each person had to come to terms with the trauma caused when a Dublin accountant decided one cold winter morning to end my city’s sense of itself.  It wasn’t easy to report that one in a detached manner.  I find maintaining impartiality in politics easy, enjoyable even, but when the sit-in started at Waterford Crystal it was the only time I remember wanting to shout, get angry, man the barricades.  I didn’t, and no doubt I would have had little useful to say, but being a reporter was never harder than that day.  And yet, life goes on.  New York is still New York, and Waterford will still be Waterford.  I think a man (or woman) picking themselves up from the ground with a bloody nose, and dusting themselves off while making a black, black joke has always been our self-image.  We’ll pick ourselves up; I just wish we didn’t have to do it so often.